How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mindby Pema Chödrön

When we look for a meditation teacher, we want someone who has an intimate knowledge of the path. That's why so many have turned to Pema Chödrön, whose gentle yet straightforward guidance has been a lifesaver for both first-time and experienced meditators. With How to Meditate, the American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun presents her first book that explores in-depth what she considers the essentials for an evolving practice that helps you live in a wholehearted way.

More and more people are beginning to recognize a profound inner longing for authenticity, connection, compassion, and aliveness. Meditation, Pema explains, gives us a golden key to address this yearning. This comprehensive guide shows readers how to honestly meet and openly relate with the mind to embrace the fullness of our experience as we discover:

. The basics of meditation, from getting settled and the six points of posture to working with your breath and cultivating an attitude of unconditional friendliness

. The Seven Delights-how moments of difficulty can become doorways to awakening and love

. Thoughts and emotions as "sheer delight"-instead of obstacles-in meditation

Here is in indispensable book from the meditation teacher who remains a first choice for students the world over.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 2

“Stabilizing the Mind”

Whenever you sit down to meditate, the first thing you do is settle. Settling means that you come into the room where you intend to practice meditation and you allow yourself to be completely as you are. You check in with yourself. You have a sense of being here and knowing what you brought in with you. Perhaps on one particular day you have felt very quiet since breakfast; perhaps you were looking out at the ocean or at the trees outside your window, and you actually come to your meditation quite settled and still. Other times you may feel rushed: you gobbled your breakfast and ran up and down the stairs, and you arrive at your meditation feeling all wound up. Maybe something happened last night or after breakfast that has you worried and upset, and so you’re completely churned up. Maybe you’re really tired, so you feel like you’re hardly there. You might even feel dull or a sense of sinking.

One thing we can say for sure is that whenever you make time to sit down and practice meditation, you bring something along—you bring your thoughts and joys from the day with you, your disappointments and your concerns. The idea isn’t to just plunk down and start your timer and block out everything that you’ve brought with you. So first, have some sense of where you’re at. Ask yourself the questions: What am I feeling physically? What is my mood? What is the quality of my mind? So step one in getting settled is to check in with yourself.

The point is that there’s not a good way to come into meditation or a bad way to come into meditation. It might feel preferable to show up feeling calm and spacious, but really meditation is about being awake and present to whatever is going on. You can’t critique your meditation in terms of good and bad.

The only thing you can measure your meditation against is the question: “Was I present or not?” And even then, to say to yourself that you weren’t present is a result of the fact that you’ve been meditating and you recognized that fact. There’s some sense of awareness about what is actually happening.

Exercise

TOUCHING IN WITH THE PRESENT MOMENT
At the beginning of a meditation session, it can be helpful to check in with your mind before you begin. See where you’re at right now. To find yourself in the present moment, it can help if you run through a series of questions to help you contact your mind, to help you to become aware of what’s happening in this very moment.

So the first question is: What are you feeling?

Can you contact what you’re feeling? It could be your mood or your physical body, a quality of drowsiness or peacefulness, agitation or physical pain—anything. Can you contact that nonverbally and just get a sense of what you’re feeling?

To refine this question a little bit: Are there any emotions? Can you be present to them? Can you contact them?

We’re not talking about having to name anything or remembering the history of the emotion, or anything like that. Just be present to what you’re feeling right now.

Are you experiencing any physical sensations right now?
Pain, tightness, relaxation?
What about your thoughts? What’s the quality of your thoughts right now? Is your mind very busy? Is it quite drowsy? Is it surprisingly still? Are your thoughts raging or peaceful or dull? Obsessive or calm?

If I were to ask you personally, right now,
“What is the quality of your mind at this moment?”
Whether it’s still or wild or dull, whatever it might be, what would you say?

Hopefully these questions will help you touch in and make deep contact with yourself. I suggest that you begin your meditation practice with these questions. With practice, you’ll find that you don’t need to run through a list of questions to bring yourself into the present moment on your cushion. It will become more automatic. Your intention is to simply locate your mind and stabilize the mind as you launch into your practice.

Exercise

BODY SCAN
An additional way that I find effective to check in with myself—and call myself into the present moment before I begin a meditation session—is to do a body scan. You can start by standing up and allowing for a deep inhale and exhale. You can do a complete body scan really quickly, and the idea is to place your mind on each body part so you can get a sense of how that body part feels in the present moment. So, for example, you might call yourself to the soles of the feet because you’re standing, and you notice what is going on there. Perhaps your soles are numb; perhaps they feel awake and tingling. There will be parts of the body, as you go through it, that you probably won’t be able to feel. If you get to pain, no problem—just allow yourself to notice and feel it.

But still, place your open awareness on each part of the body. This is an exercise in mindfulness, an exercise in attention to the physical body. So first, begin by standing for a minute. You can have your eyes open, or you can have your eyes closed. Just place your mind, your light, your gentle attention, on each part of the body. I like to allow myself about ten seconds of silence with each body part.

Start going through your body.

The soles of your feet.
The back of your ankles. Your calves.
The back of your knees. The back of your thighs.
Your buttocks. The lower back. Middle back.
Upper back and shoulders. Your arms. Armpits.
The back of the upper arms. Elbows.
Back of the lower arms. The back of the hands.
The palms of the hands. Back of the fingers.
Tips of the fingers. The front of the hands.
Front of the lower arms. Front of the upper arms.
Your shoulders. Back of the neck. Back of the head.
Back of the ears. Top of the head. Forehead. Eyes. Nose.
Your cheeks. Your mouth. The lips. Tongue. Teeth.
Your chin. Throat. Chest. Solar plexus. Stomach.
Genitals. Front of the thighs. Knees. Shins.
Top of the feet. The top of the toes.
Having done all that, see if you can feel now some sense of the whole body: standing, relaxed, maybe not so relaxed, but standing in the present moment.